In a Super Bowl ad for Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+, Chris Hemsworth fears that AI is trying to kill him.
Perhaps it triggers a rogue garage door or closes the pool cover while he goes swimming. Of course, we eventually find out that the AI just wants him to be happy and offers him a massage to relieve his tension.
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Coincidentally, concerns about AI seem to be on the rise, and the Super Bowl is about to be at the center of the conversation. Despite AI threatening every part of the entertainment business, live sports remains the king of advertising, with even the biggest tech giants willing to shell out $8 million to $10 million in fees (and millions more in production costs) to secure advertising space.
Sure, AI may steal all of our time (and perhaps our jobs and lives?), but for now, these companies are paying a lot of money to get even the slightest bit of human attention.
Google Gemini, for example, is taking a serious approach with its advertising, showing how it wants users to be able to take advantage of its technology.
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But it was the public retaliation between Anthropic and OpenAI that drew the most surprise.
Some background: OpenAI has announced plans to introduce advertising to its ChatGPT product, with the goal of driving revenue to cover the significant costs of starting an AI company.
Anthropic, which has both professional AI tools and the Claude AI assistant, is using its Super Bowl ad to launch a not-so-veiled attack on OpenAI.
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“We’re constantly seeing evidence that advertising works beautifully in the right context. We’re using advertising’s biggest platform to ask a simple question: ‘Are ads everywhere?’ So we created a funny ad about how unfunny that is,” said Felix Richter, CCO at Mother, the agency that created the ad. “People ask AI about their health, relationships, business, and it comes back with a sponsored answer. You don’t have to explain why it’s wrong; you just have to show it.”
But Claude’s ad clearly struck a nerve. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded in a post to X:
“I think it’s only natural that Anthropic Doublespeak would use deceptive advertising to criticize theoretical deceptive advertising that isn’t real, but the Super Bowl ad is not what I would expect,” he wrote, adding that he thought it was funny, but his response didn’t sound like he was laughing. “Anthropic provides expensive products to wealthy people. We’re happy they’re doing that, and so are we, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to the billions of people who can’t afford a subscription.”
So OpenAI is using the Super Bowl to make its own case.
“When it comes to the Super Bowl ad, it’s about builders and how it became possible for anyone to build anything,” Altman said.
But with a Super Bowl filled with AI ads using AI chatbots and AI technology, will it resonate with the humans watching, or will it become a doomed relic left in the corner of LLM?
